RateMyDrawings Drawing Tutorial

Simple Abstract Tips That I Personally Use

For Anim3luver this is a tut about how I draw my pieces. It's nothing special or hard.

Tutorial category: RateMyDrawings
Tutorial type: Step-by-step
Submitted by:Xx3Riah3xXTools used:
RMD, can be used really with photoshop or sai any semi-complex program really with flip tools and layers.

I draw abstracts in java mainly. Make sure you add a new layer and delete the first one, because the first one has a white background while any new layers will be transparent. This step is pretty important or it could ruin the first parts of your drawing.

Step 2

Just showing you some of the brushes and techniques I use. Basically all of them. There's smoothing, spacing and scattering, watercolor pen, pen tool, airbrush, the texture palette, inverting, blurring, filling, burning and dodging. Most of all I definitely abuse the flip tools and layers for the patterns I get. I really love making symmetrical abstracts.
You can go so many places with abstract work. That's why I prefer it. But for my own work that I mainly do, it starts something like this...

Step 3

What I do to make a piece is mainly just doodling and drawing simple things and then editing them to look interesting and give off the mood I'm thinking of. So for this one, I chose some greens and used the watercolor brush. I also turned up the smoothing and added some smooth yellow lines. I'm planning on not messing with it too much to keep this simple.

Step 4

Since abstract can be so many things with so many outcomes, from here on out I'm just going to tell you what I did.
Duplicate| flip horizontal| changed layer style to I think multiply| merged down| used the fill tool on the sides

I erased some of the yellow that I didn't want, put it on add layer style, and made it a bit transparent.
Now this one's a cool step to add a shadow. I did the same thing as last time but with white. You want to duplicate it, lock alpha, then color with what color you want the shadow to be. Put the shadow layer under the original layer. Now you can either drag it a bit down and to the side to make it show; or blur the shadow underneath the white layer, duplicate it twice or so, and merge it down. Try this part out it's pretty cool :)

Step 9

okay! now I'm going to show you another way to make good abstracts- reusing old works!!! It uses the same techniques. Say maybe you have a portrait. Start adding reflecting and changing and in no time you'll have something really interesting looking! For example, her I have one of my recent drawings. I wanted it to look completely different, so I selected a piece and laid a pattern of it down.

Same kind of thing, vertical. I inverted the second layer to change up the colors. You just gotta experiment and find out what works. :l

Step 12

I saw some interesting faces in yellow. They look pretty sinister, so I wanted to add some red coloring ^-^ Lets see what we can do with the layer styles to make it happen.

Step 13

I made the red layer a bit more interesting. after this screenshot I added a few more color areas.

Step 14

Okay that's better. i added some more details. I like it where it's at! c:
OKAY!~
So just remember to just go for it, keep editing and making changes until you get it where you want it. Keep exploring with what you can do on here and you'll have really amazing stuff happening, most likely way better than I can do! Have fun!